Weather Station: Recorded Data is Stored for Analysis

Investing in a wind turbine is a big step. Doing some research before considering such a move will pay off in many ways. My husband and I decided to purchase a weather station to help us know just exactly how feasible it would be for us to purchase a wind turbine. Due to my husband's interest and frugality he found a great deal on a weather station that will track and store data The station will allow us to know inside and outside temperature, wind speed, wind direction, barometric pressure and rainfall. Wow! A little more information than I need. And the data is logged onto our computer through a wireless connection as well as being stored by battery when we are not logged on and then downloaded when we connect. We will have monthly readings to use for our analysis. Effortless research you may think.

Ha. Effortless has little to do with this project although it really didn't require too much skill, effort or cost to purchase, assemble and install our weather station. We purchased a ProWeather Station TM on sale through Amazon.com for $135.99. It arrived as promised and required little assembly. The directions were easy to follow and nothing caused us to reconsider the project. The assembly part was fairly easy. The next part however was a bit of a challenge. My husband said, "We need to mount the weather station at a height of at least 30 feet." Ok. Right. That is where the difficulty began. It was easy enough to purchase three sections of ten foot long PVC pipe, connectors and glue. We drove a smaller metal pipe into the ground near the end of our garage to slip the thirty foot section of PVC pipe holding the weather station onto for support. All was going as planned. We glued the sections of pipe together, mounted the weather station on top and planned to raise the pipes and slip them over the metal pole and then clamp them to the end of the garage for support. We carefully lifted the joined poles and attempted to first place the end of the top pole onto the bottom edge of the roof and then slide it up and hopefully lift the bottom of the pole over the metal pipe and slip it to the ground. Need I say that was not possible? We did however remove one section of pipe and were able to lift two sections of pipe with the weather station mounted on top high enough to slip the bottom over the support pole. My husband climbed the ladder we had waiting and clamped the pole to the end of the garage. We successfully mounted the weather station twenty feet in the air.

The weather station directions told us the direction the station should be pointed. By using a compass we were able to accomplish that step during the mounting process. The next step was to check the computer on which the software had already been loaded to see if we were receiving readings from the station. It was amazing. Immediately we could see all of the readings. Success.

We have been tracking the readings for a little over three weeks now and are going to monitor the wind speed and direction for several months to help us with our decision on the feasibility of installing a wind turbine.

There are many types and price ranges for weather stations. There are companies which will do this part of the research for you at a fairly expensive rate. We were delighted to find that we could purchase a weather station that met our needs. We were also glad that we were able to assemble, mount and record the necessary data on our own at a reasonable cost. DIY is not always possible but in this case it was not only possible but sort of a fun project.